Latest articles
A small town with a big history
by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin / October 2nd, 2026
Cabeza del Buey [Head of the Ox] is a beautiful old town in the province of Badajoz in Extremadura, Spain in the region known as La Serena, roughly 300 km southwest of Madrid, near the borders with Andalusia and Castilla-La Mancha. The town hosts a population of around 4,500 inhabitants. It is situated on the foothills of the Sierra Morena mountains and nearby lakes. It is well-known by bird watchers for the variety and quantity of its many different bird species.
I was invited to Cabeza del Buey earlier this year by local teacher and historian, Nazaret Serrano Simancas, due to …
by Binoy Kampmark / October 2nd, 2026
There was nothing new in the Reality Television President’s swill filled address to the United Nations General Assembly on September 22. Donald Trump had said much of it before, most of it with wearying derangement and detachment from reality. There were the bullying threats of annihilation and doomsday relish that never eventuate. There were the usual flashed credentials, now long worn, of a Cincinnatus briefly brought from plough to war for the state. “While others have talked, I have acted; while others have spoken of peace, I have made peace.” There were the stock verbal assaults on outsized, …
by Heather Stroud / October 1st, 2026
Lebanon — When veteran reporter Robert Fisk, first entered the Beirut Palestinian refugee camp 18th September 1982, these are some the words he wrote to describe what he saw:
‘It was the flies that told us. There were millions of them. Big as bluebottles, they covered us, unaware at first of the difference between the living and the dead. If the smell of the dead in Sidon was nauseating, the stench in Chatila made us retch. The dead were everywhere – in the road, in alleyways, in backyards and broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry and laid on top of rubbish tips. The …
by Lee Camp / October 1st, 2026
It’s rare to see these kinds of documents — internal emails and memos from executives at Microsoft and OpenAI candidly discussing how exactly they’re currently stealing labor and killing the internet.
They were forced to release the docs by a massive lawsuit in which the New York Times is accusing them of copyright infringement. And not just any copyright infringement. It’s the largest case of copyright infringement ever. …Like, ever.
If you’re taking this moment to cheer for the New York Times, please put away your pom poms. The Times is …
by Edward Curtin / October 1st, 2026
Form (not genre) is the key to understanding literature that opens cracks in conventional understanding. But exactly what form is is unknowable. Goethe said there was “an open mystery” to every form. One either senses it or not. It comes with a thrill of recognition.
As Roberto Calasso puts it, it is “by a certain vibration or luminescence of the sentence” or whole that one catches it and “a sort of second reality opens out beyond that other reality where everyone has agreed on the …
by John Perry / October 1st, 2026
Nicaragua’s electoral reforms seek to defend popular sovereignty as Washington intensifies its interference in Latin American elections.
Photo: Radio NicaraguaLast week I was at a local neighborhood meeting in the Nicaraguan city of Masaya. More than a hundred people had come to hear a report from a doctor from the local health center and from a teacher at the technical college where the meeting was being held. We learnt about the attention being given to pregnant women (currently 11 pregnancies in the area), the mobile health clinic that would …
by Francisco Dominguez and Roger D. Harris / October 1st, 2026
Underneath the appearance of “normalcy” in the ongoing relationship between Venezuela and the US lies a manifest asymmetry of power. Even commentators from mainstream international news outlets frame their analyses by drawing attention to the proverbial US gun held to acting President Delcy Rodríguez’s head and, by implication, to the whole Chavista movement. That movement, founded by Hugo Chávez and carried forward by Nicolás Maduro, has broadly united behind her.
The US attack of January 3 killed over 100 persons and succeeded in kidnapping President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, an elected member …
by Visualizing Palestine / October 1st, 2026
It has been more than a year since the European Union (EU), Israel’s number one trade partner, found that Israel is in breach of the human rights clause of the EU–Israel Association Agreement. Despite recent sanctions on trade with illegal Israeli settlements imposed by twelve countries, the EU continues to choose complicity over accountability. As the success of a recent European Citizens’ Initiative demonstrates, the EU’s position has never been more at odds with the views of the European public.
In July, a European Citizens’ Initiative calling for …
by Binoy Kampmark / October 1st, 2026
Things are looking bleaker by the day for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, most notably for his standing as a competent leader in full mastery of his office. After allegations were made that he had received warnings from the United Arab Emirates leader President Mohamed bin Zayed (MBZ) that the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas was, if not imminent then certainly most likely, a sense of paralytic denial has taken hold.
The claim by Haaretz, based on research for the book Hostages: 843 Days of Abandonment by Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, finds Netanyahu being told, in …
On Iran, Oppression, and the Colonial Mind
by Amel-Ba’al / September 30th, 2026
“Before the palefaces came among us, we enjoyed the happiness of unbounded freedom and were acquainted with neither riches, wants, nor oppression.”
— Chief Tecumseh
“When I fought to protect my land and my home, I was called a savage. When I neither understood nor welcomed …
The Last Hurrah
by Dan Lieberman / September 30th, 2026
He is fading fast, feeling more alone each day, displaying an increasing strain, becoming more erratic, finding it more difficult to gain the adulation that enables his survival. Punch-drunk Donald Trump is on the ropes, and the referee is ready to call it a technical knockout. He leans against Xi jinping, who could give Trump a knockout punch, but is content to prop him up before the referee makes the final call. The long nightmare of the deluded figure, wandering the White House grounds, slaying the dragons that contaminate the capital city, is nearing its end. Before the end, there …
by Vernon Sutherland / September 30th, 2026
When I was a teenager, I used to frequent an overpass near my house. It was over a busy motorway, and it was not uncommon to see white tents underneath me. These white tents, clinical tachrichim, meant only one thing – that somebody had been hit and killed.
I don’t think it’s possible for any living person to fully understand death, but many artists have used their mediums to try to, and amongst those artists are Gene Roddenberry, Dan O’Bannon, and Ronald Shushett. Star Trek and Alien stand as two beacons in the sea of portrayals of death – …
by Allen Forrest / September 30th, 2026
What brings on digital media-itis?
An academic scandal for all involved parties and why some of us withdraw now.
by Jan Oberg / September 30th, 2026
How Oxford University Press allowed a personality‑driven narrative to masquerade as scholarship.
A Special Issue in a scholarly journal is not an ordinary publication. It is a collective, curated statement about a subject of central importance to a field. When the International Studies Association, ISA, and Oxford University Press, OUP, publish a Special Issue devoted to Johan Galtung’s academic and scholarly contributions, the expectations are correspondingly high. One expects rigorous intellectual history, conceptual analysis, and a sober evaluation of one of the indisputable founders of peace and conflict studies. One …
by Renee Parsons / September 30th, 2026
With the mid term election fast approaching, there is an ominous foreboding as American voters reject a carefully contrived political paralysis. Despite President Trump’s vulgar fabrications, he well knows as the American public that the US has lost its unprovoked war on Iran in an epic failure – as American voters can be expected to repudiate his policy.
To their credit, the Iranians refused to allow assassination of its sacred Ayatollah, hundreds of school girls and the repeated bombing of hospitals, schools and civilian infrastructure to cower into passivity, as proof of the degradation of an abusive US foreign policy.
American voters, …
by Yves Engler / September 29th, 2026
“Intellectual leader of the free world”, Mark Carney is returning Canada to its stature under Lester Pearson. The prime minister’s position on Iran highlights both the absurdity and appropriateness of the superlatives.
According to former foreign affairs minister John Manley, Carney has emerged as the “intellectual leader of the free world.” In “At age 159, Canada is finally a power on …
by Ted Glick / September 29th, 2026
Less than two weeks from now, on October 12, Indigenous Peoples Day will be recognized around the country. On this day, 534 years ago, Christopher Columbus and his men were discovered in the Caribbean, lost and trying to find present-day India. Thus began over 500 years of European colonization of the Americas.
by Ron Ridenour / September 29th, 2026
September 16-25 The mass media of Denmark, where I live, was saturated with jubilation for many of Donroe Trump’s victories, resulting in my becoming nauseously depressed.
September 16-18: President Donald Trump imposed 100%-500% tariffs for firms or countries buying Russian oil, gas, other goods, or countries supporting Russia’s existential war against Ukraine. He even imposed sanctions upon Russian officials including “friend” President Vladimir Putin and “his” “shadow fleet” of oil tankers allegedly used by Russia to evade US sanctions. No matter United Nations international law, which most countries no longer deem relevant.
At the same time, Trump sought to strangle Russia, he …
Sanctions are not creating a replacement for the dollar. They are
creating something more subtle: redundancy.
by R.L. / September 29th, 2026
For years, the debate over American financial power has revolved around the wrong question: Will sanctions eventually destroy the dollar’s global dominance?
So far, the evidence says no.
The dollar remains the central currency of the international monetary system. In the first quarter of 2026, it accounted for roughly 57 percent of global foreign-exchange reserves. It still dominates foreign-exchange transactions, cross-border finance, international debt and much of global trade invoicing. Federal Reserve officials can therefore point, correctly, to a monetary hierarchy that has proved remarkably resistant to predictions of imminent “de-dollarization.” (IMF)
But that conclusion risks confusing two different things.
Dollar dominance is …
by Binoy Kampmark / September 29th, 2026
Five men, initially detained on suspicion of committing offences under the Explosives Act, then arrested on suspicion of preparation of a terrorist act. Residents of 85 households in the Cotswolds village of Whelford evacuated to Cirencester leisure centre. A 400-metre area with three white vans cordoned off. The same men, released within hours of being seized near the Royal Air Force Fairford base in Gloucestershire after it was found that the chemicals found in their vans were not deemed “viable” as explosives. All British nationals, aged 23 to 25, and London residents. Other details on background scrupulously omitted by the …
by Gary Olson / September 28th, 2026
Volkswagen (VW) began as the “people’s car” under Hitler but before long it was primarily producing military vehicles, V1 bombs and missiles for the Wehrmacht in World War II. Some 80 percent of the VW workers were forced labor, including prisoners from concentration camps, many of whom did not survive. The complex contained four concentration camps and eight forced-labor camps. In 1944, a VW engineer traveled to Auschwitz and selected 300 hundred skilled …
by Denis Rancourt / September 28th, 2026
You have received the sacrament of vaccination by bodily injection with bio-dispersive cytotoxic cationic lipid nanoparticles and their cargo. Many of you did this out of presumed moral rectitude and to save yourselves from injury and death no less.
In your minds, the unfaithful who resisted and refused the injection are at best simply ignorant and selfish and at worse criminally reckless deserving the ultimate punishments of banishment and death.
However, it turns out that the “protections” you participated in imposing (from masking to isolation to confinement to imposed testing and injection) actually killed millions worldwide, …
Review of /The Base
by Kim Petersen / September 28th, 2026
The monopoly media predominantly covers warring through the lens of political power. Of course, the politicians do not directly take part in the physical violence; that would require a physicality and courage that most politicians do not possess. But politicians are the ones who make the decisions to send humans to fight wars. The service personnel are, therefore, culpable in the violence. In the American case, the fighters chose to take part in wars and not declare conscientious objector status.
However, there are other cogs complicit in the death and destruction wrought …
by Glenn Greenwald / September 26th, 2026
Julian Assange bravely exposed the corruption, violence, and immorality of the Establishment. This elicited deep concern among elitist forces in the world that prefer to operate in the Dark, shielded from public scrutiny. They sought to silence evidence of their evil by destroying Julian Assange. The Establishment imposed various forms of illegitimate incarceration on Assange for several years. Assanged suffered but endured. Such sacrifice is heroic and symbolic: Saving Julian Assange is Saving Ourselves. The evidence is the extent that Assange’s example has motivated others to reject the darkness of the Establishment and work toward a better …
Why Tehran’s strategic orientation could reshape the balance between the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific
by R.L. / September 26th, 2026
This article maps strategic options and constraints from an international-relations perspective. It does not advocate military action, external intervention, or any particular political outcome in Iran.
The architecture of global power rarely changes through a single election, crisis, or war. It changes when the sources of hegemony change—and when states positioned between competing systems alter their strategic direction. The three decades since the end of the Cold War reveal both processes. American primacy rested on more than military superiority. China’s rise was built through a combination of domestic institutional change and integration into a Western-led economic order. The 2020s, in turn, …
by Allen Forrest / September 26th, 2026
What might a band apologize for in advance of their concert? An apology on behalf of who?
Which is it?
by Yves Engler / September 26th, 2026
Considering the US president’s threats it would be “irresponsible” of Ottawa not to prepare for a US attack. But it’s far more “irresponsible” to boost an annexationist country’s military and belligerence if you were serious about the possibility of invasion.
In a recent New York Times interview Prime Minister Carney said his government has examined the possibility of a military attack by the US. While Carney described an invasion as an “extreme tail risk”, he suggested it would be “irresponsible not to [prepare].” While some say the Times exaggerated Carney’s words, the …
Examination of the Moral, Civilizational, and Global Implications of Artificial and Synthetic Intelligence, Part 11
by Sammy Attoh / September 26th, 2026
Every civilization reaches a threshold — a moment when the illusions that sustained it begin to crack, when the distractions that numbed it begin to fail, when the lies that comforted it begin to dissolve. This moment is not chosen. It arrives. It interrupts. It confronts. It exposes.
Humanity is approaching such a moment.
Not a technological awakening. Not a political awakening. Not a cultural awakening.
A human awakening — the return of awareness after a long sleep.
This awakening is not optional. It is inevitable.
I. The Breaking Point of Numbness
Numbness is not permanent. It is a temporary shield — a way for the …
The agreement is catastrophic both because of what it says and what it doesn’t mention. It reduces further the major asset of security policies: Freedom of action.
by Jan Oberg / September 26th, 2026
A couple of hours before the agreement was signed on September 22, 2026, I published the following 13 hypotheses about what it would most likely contain on TFF Substack (in English).
I was wrong on only the first point. Contrary to what Trump had written on his Truth Social platform, it does not appear to come into force immediately. In fact, it turned out to be worse than even I had anticipated.
After these hypotheses now come a number of reflections in light of what the agreement …
by Yves Engler / September 25th, 2026
The meltdown over Alex Ovechkin advertising Vladimir Putin’s party is hypocritical. The National Hockey League and its players have long backed politicians responsible for war crimes.
In Thursday’s Globe and Mail former NHL goalie Dominik Hasek and Marcus Kolga published a column calling on Ottawa to sanction the greatest goal scorer in hockey history. “Alexander Ovechkin used his fame to back Putin. We must remember that” they concluded, “Each time he steps onto the ice, that political choice will follow him. If Canada is serious about defending the lives of Ukrainians and …
